Spring clean

Break out your old pair of rubber gloves, find that aged tooth brush, get down on hands and knees to scrub behind the toilet. Spring cleaning season is upon us.

But as this is the 21st Century, before you begin beating the carpets, there’s a more modern way to tidy up your house.

There are loads of gadgets and clever tricks for making a spring clean easier and more successful.

And when you’re done with your living space, why not give your PC an annual service too? You’ll find a clean computer is faster, more efficient and has more room than one filled with electronic clutter.

Streamline your life

Spring cleaning isn’t just about clearing out the rubbish to let it build up again, it’s about making your home more efficient and easier to keep tidy in the future.

So before you begin, this is a good time to make sure you’ve got the right tools for the whole year round.

Everyone knows bagless, cyclonic vacuum cleaners are brilliant, for example, but if you’re stuck in a tiny flat you don’t have to share it with the dust bunnies.

Dyson’s DC23 can be packed away into a space barely bigger than its 2.5 litre cylinder, yet has a massive 200 Watts of suction power, and the DC26 is small enough to fit on an A4 piece of paper.

Five ways to clean up your computer

While you’re cleaning up your physical spaces, why not have a go at sorting out technological clutter too?

For example, a simple cable organiser, like the Technika cable tidy kit, can make a huge difference to your workspace, computer desk or TV and DVD player set-up, while a universal remote can cut down on the amount of devices taking up couch space in the living room.

Your PC is probably in need of a tidy up inside and out, but where to begin?

Here’s our top five computer cleaning tips:

• Be careful not to spray glass cleaner directly on to the screen, as liquids can run down the glass into the internal components. Far better to use lint free wipes soaked in a special solution.
• To clean a greasy keyboard, unplug it and wipe it down with a soft damp cloth. Use a canister of compressed air or a handheld vacuum to shake out crumbs from underneath the keys too.
• Don’t stop with the outside, either. Just deleting unused shortcuts and files from your desktop can make a PC more of a pleasure to use and speed up boot times too.
• Archiving old photos and videos to a portable hard drive, like the iomega eGo portable hard drive, or writeable DVD will free up space and improve performance.
• A program like Computer Associates’ PC Tune-Up 2.0 can search for unused programs and files that can be thrown away to make even more room on your hard disk, and will also clear out old parts of the registry that are slowing the PC down.